This opera by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) is not for the faint hearted. It tells a genuine horror story about a woman who loves an angel with devilish obsession. The knight Ruprecht falls under the spell of Renata who is plagued by demons and sets off with her on an adventurous quest to find her fiery angel, which ends before the inquisition.

The “Renata case” has its roots in the age of the German counterreformation but the Russian novelist Briussov turned it into a symbolic parable about souls which are governed by obsessions, superstitions and sexual urges. When Prokofiev began composing his opera “The Fiery Angel” in New York in 1920, he was completely obsessed with this material. The lonely woman full of yearning and hunger for sex, embodying male fantasies both of innocence and a demonic seductress, is ultimately destroyed by an all-powerful system. In this case Prokofiev was writing about the personal fears and anxieties which preoccupied him on his return to the Stalinist Soviet Union. The self-destructive ecstasy of the individual is related to a malign social machine to which it is enslaved.

Director Immo Karaman, who has already demonstrated great psychological artistry at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein with his impressive Britten cycle and Zemlinsky’s single act opera “The Dwarf”, has found another piece here in Prokofjew’s opera where he can dig deep into extreme situations of the human soul.

***Sergei Prokofiev
DER FEURIGE ENGEL

Opera in five acts op. 37
Libretto by the composer after the novel ‘Ognenny angel’ by Valeri Yakovlevich Briussov